Boulder County people living in poverty on the increase, report says

BOULDER -- Poverty is continuing its rise in Boulder County, according to a recent report examining quality-of-life indicators in the county.

An estimated 42,000 of Boulder County's 294,500-plus residents have incomes or are in families whose household incomes put them at or below federally established poverty lines, according to the 2011 Boulder County Trends report from the Community Foundation Serving Boulder County.

Under the federal government's current poverty guidelines, an individual is considered poor if his or her 2011 income is less than $10,890, and a family of four will fall below the poverty line if its household income this year totals less than $22,350.

In 2002, about 10 percent of the individuals in Boulder County and 5 percent of the families had below-poverty-level individual or family incomes, the Community Foundation said in the latest edition of its biennial Trends report. That year, the national poverty benchmark threshold was $8,860 for an individual and $18,100 for a family of four.

In 2009 -- when the federal poverty threshold was $10,830 for an individual and $22,050 for a family of four -- 14 percent of the individuals in Boulder County and 8 percent of its families had incomes below the poverty line, the Trends report said.

That 2009 poverty rate for individuals in Boulder County was "the same as the level of poverty nationally," said Community Foundation president Josie Heath.

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"That was certainly an eye-opener," Heath said in an interview.

Boulder County's overall per capita personal income continues to exceed national and Colorado levels, and its unemployment rates are generally lower than most of the rest of the metropolitan Denver area, economic data that sometimes bring the county "a lot of accolades," said Morgan Rogers, director of the Community Foundation's Civic Forum and the editor of its Trends report.

Meanwhile, though, "I think that folks often under-estimate the kind of poverty we're seeing in Boulder County right now," Rogers said.

In Heath's letter to readers in the report, she said: "Take a moment to let it sink in that even though we live in a beautiful place and most of us enjoy a high quality of life, everyone is not as fortunate as it might seem."

The Trends report further noted that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, the Boulder County residents struggling to live by themselves on below-poverty-level incomes -- or who were in households whose family incomes were below the poverty line in 2009 -- included:

6 percent of the county's elderly.

13 percent of the county's children, including 9 percent of the children living in the city of Boulder in 2009, 17 percent of the children living in Longmont, and 18 percent of the children in Lafayette at that point.

23 percent of the county's children under the age of 5.

The Trends report, which the Community Foundation formally released on Aug. 23, also highlighted income and poverty-level divides along ethnic lines in Boulder County. It said Latinos households had an average median household income of $32,205 in 2009, about 52 percent of the $67,155 median household income for non-Hispanic whites that year.

Latinos account for about 14 percent of Boulder County's population. But they represented 22 percent of the county residents living below the poverty line in 2009.

"That disparity widens when you compare the rate of Latino children living in poverty, 32 percent, to non-Hispanic white children, 6 percent," the Trends report said.

"Boulder County is a community facing some very real poverty issues," but it's also "a community that is working very hard to protect its most vulnerable," the report said.

"Families living in poverty struggle to access housing and food, in addition to transportation, child care and health care,' the report said.

Rogers also has emphasized, when previous Trends reports were issued, that national poverty benchmarks understate what it really costs to live in Boulder County.

The 2011 Trends report also cites data showing what it says is other evidence of a growing economic divide. It said data shows that Boulder County's middle class -- people with annual incomes between $50,000 and $100,000 -- is shrinking, in proportion to people making less or more than those amounts.

That's a point of concern, Heath said, because the middle class "is such a core part of the community" and the source of volunteers who can afford to take the time for tasks that range from teaching in Sunday schools to serving as Scout leaders.

Also troublesome, Rogers said, was a point-in-time Denver metropolitan homeless count taken one night last January, which tallied 1,550 homeless people in Boulder County, including 914 in the city of Boulder and 636 in Longmont.

About 61 percent of the homeless people counted in those two Boulder County cities were families with children under the age of 18, the Trends report said.

The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County and its Civic Forum research arm track a variety of "indicators" in its biennial trends reports, including chapters on demographics, education, health and human services, the economy and housing, the environment, arts and culture, and civic participation and charitable giving.

Heath, a former Boulder County commissioner, said the Trends report serves as something of "a canary in a coal mine," put there to warn the Boulder County community of potentially toxic threats to its well-being.

The 2011 Trends report -- available online on the Community Foundation Serving Boulder County's website, commfound.org -- suggests ways that local governments, school systems, nonprofit agencies, and individual volunteers can get involved in trying to solve those problems -- and the kind of long-term planning that Rogers said the Boulder County community needs to put those solutions into effect and to track results.

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